Former Czech president Vaclav Havel has died, aged 75.
Mr Havel first came to international fame as a dissident playwright in the 1970s and was jailed frequently for criticism of the communist government.
He helped found the Charter 77 movement for democratic change.
Six months after completing his last jail sentence he led hundreds of thousands of protesters in Prague in a peaceful uprising in November 1989, known as the Velvet Revolution, that ended Soviet-backed rule.
Just over a month later he was installed as president in Prague castle.
Angered by the looming breakup of Czechoslovakia, Havel quit as president in 1992, but soon became leader of the newly created Czech Republic.
Human rights stayed high on his agenda, as did anxiety about the environment and the pursuit of moral values in the globalising world, and he was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The former chain smoker, who survived several operations for lung cancer and a burst intestine in the late 1990s that nearly killed him and left him frail for the rest of his life, died after a long respiratory illness.
Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Mr Havel's influence extended all around the world.
